In one game, a girl is banished to a corner of the playground while her friends guess her boyfriend. The girl returns to be confronted with the name of her true love and confess to the accuracy of their whisperings.It soon became obvious that Polly’s real love was Adam, who had sent Polly a handmade Christmas card – his mother had told me it was the only one to ‘a girl’. And Polly, more recently, had declared apropos of nothing: ‘I hate Adam Green.’ As she said it, she had blushed as violently as the young Princess Di.Polly’s version of events in the playground did not square perfectly with that of her accusers. The spitting was an over-reaction to being ‘caught’ by Adam in a game He had spat back The hitting was ‘getting too near with my skipping rope’. And she still insists she did not call him names.But the details are less important than the whole picture.

Polly had been trying to goad Adam into a kind of reaction, to pay her attention. Now she understood she was hurting him, and that he was as frightened of her approaches as she was scared by the power of her own feelings.She desperately wanted to make amends and wrote him a note in her best handwriting and spelling:’Deer Ad, I am sorry if I hert you I did not meen to upset you I hop we can still be frends. Love from Polly XXX.’Underneath was a picture of the two of them holding hands and flying kites in a park with smiling flowers. We delivered the letter and Angela reported that Adam thought Polly ‘awfully brave’ for writing it Polly, as far as I know, has since left Adam alone. The sad thing is that they don’t seem to play together at all any more.

But I caught the two of tham smiling coyly at each other over a desk at the last parent- teacher evening. Who knows, this could still be the start of a beautiful relationship.. It was a grey, rainy Thursday in October when the diagnosis was finally made. For almost 12 months, Sara Koe had suffered vision problems since an accident in which she knocked her head on the sharp corner of metal scaffolding. Within three days she had double vision, after a week her pupils became smaller, and finally an X-ray revealed that her brain had shrunk.

After being seen by a number of doctors and specialists came the diagnosis – Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, known to some doctors as the Mona Lisa Disease because of one of its classic symptoms of unmoving, staring eyes.
‘When the doctor told me, he was not at all clear about what the condition was and, I felt, slightly discouraged questions He looked young, but overworked and under pressure. So was I,’ said her husband, Brigadier Michael Koe.’Should I tell Sara? What should I tell her? I needed time to think Was there a cure? How would we cope? She was only just 54. Over the previous year she had been desperate for someone to tell her what was wrong with her eyes. but what an answer.’Dr Andrew Lees, consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and a leading expert on PSP, says the condition ‘presents one of the most arresting and distressing images in neurology.

Like that of the Mona Lisa, the hypnotic immutable stare fixes your attention and draws you to the bedside from the other end of the ward or the other side of the street.’PSP is a rare illness for which there is no known cause, no cure, and no treatment. From diagnosis to death can take just seven years – varying between individuals – and in the final stages its victims have no balance, cannot swallow, talk, or move their eyes, but remain mentally alert.PSP, which is estimated to affect 6,000 patients in the UK at any one time, is one of the last really harmful diseases about which almost nothing is known. Little research is being done and many doctors are still failing to spot the symptoms of one of the grimmest of all neurological conditions. It is estimated that only one in five cases is properly diagnosed, the remainder wrongly treated as cases of dementia or Parkinson’s disease.Neurologists do know PSP is not inherited, but a random illness where the neurons in the mid- brain deteriorate, affecting vision, balance, swallowing and speech. Theories about its cause range from toxins in the environment to a blow on the head. The almost total lack of knowledge about the disease, even among doctors, added to the trauma of diagnosis for Mrs Koe and her husband, a former officer in the Royal Green Jackets.At their Northamptonshire home, Gayton Manor, now for sale because of its unsuitability for his wife, he said: ‘We were shocked, frightened and upset. Sara was an energetic, mentally razor-sharp, superactive woman, full of the joys of life, and yet had to be told that she had a formidable disease that could have her in a wheelchair within two years.’As his wife’s condition slowly deteriorated – she now has difficulty with swallowing and with speech, and occasionally loses her balance – he set about finding out more about a disease which, unlike another rare neurological condition, the higher profile motor neuron disease, is almost unknown outside the small group of victims, their and relatives and a few specialists.